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The 2026 World Cup is almost upon us, kicking off on June 11. As someone who obsesses about the beautiful game almost every second I’m awake, I’ve been pondering on how to get my TV best prepared for the biggest sporting event on the planet. (I'm almost as excited as I was finally seeing Arsenal crowned EPL champions after 22 agonizing years…)
It pains me to say this, but I’ve started turning on a picture setting I normally loathe in order to get my eyes fully adjusted before all the balls are kicked across Canada, Mexico and the USA.
The feature in question is motion smoothing. And as someone who typically hates this setting, I must admit I feel more than a little dirty. But the truth is that it genuinely does make watching football on even the best TVs look better.
Now for movies or streamed TV, I’d rather watch Spurs for all eternity than enable motion smoothing. For sports, and specifically soccer though, it’s an entirely different kettle of footy fish.
How does motion smoothing on a TV work?
Motion smoothing is a video-processing technique that adds artificial frames of video in between the 'real' video frames being shown by your TV. This technique is sometimes known as frame interpolation, and it works in a way that isn’t entirely dissimilar to how frame generation operates in graphically demanding PC games.
Manufacturers tend to refer to motion smoothing by different names. With LG sets, it’s often known as “TruMotion”, while Sony prefers “Motionflow”. Regardless of the moniker a TV supplier uses, the underlying tech is basically the same.
If you’re lucky enough to own a high-end TV with an advanced processor, motion smoothing is going to be handled more effectively than on a budget model.
When this feature is enabled, your display’s processor analyzes whatever is happening onscreen. It then subsequently detects and tracks moving objects, makes an educated guess as to where said objects would appear between the frames based on the their speed and direction, and then displays the extra frames live during playback.
Why does sport look better with motion smoothing enabled?
By accurately tracking ball movement and adding artificial frames to smooth out camera pans, motion-smoothing features can make matches easier to follow. For sports with constant camera pans, like ice hockey, soccer and NFL games, this technique can definitely give the impression general play is unfolding in smoother fashion.
This makes onscreen action look smoother, because your eye isn't seeing such a big difference in the ball's movement each time a new image appears, so your brain is filling in the gaps less, and more detail can be perceived.
This is why motion smoothing is particularly well suited to handle fast-paced soccer matches, which we’ll no doubt see plenty of during the tournament’s latter knockout stages. In elite level clashes, the ball moves from side to side at a rapid rate, and if you want to judge whether your player was fouled or not (he clearly was) then you need to see more detail than is present in smeary regular streaming quality.
Though I generally use my LG G3 OLED’s Filmmaker Mode for everyday viewing — a preset approved by directors like Christopher Nolan that blocks TruMotion — when it’s time to obsess over Arsenal, I switch to Vivid and enable motion smoothing lickety-split.
Though the best OLED TVs are pretty good at handling fast-moving action thanks to the display tech’s near instantaneous pixel response times, persistent judder can definitely occur during camera pans — and there can be other visual issues streaming sports as well.
For subpar soccer streams, motion smoothing can help
When it comes to watching football/soccer on TV, the visual experience you’re normally going to experience won’t be anywhere near the quality of streaming a Netflix Original.
The bitrate of the streams will be lower, which means it'll be harder to track the ball in congested penalty areas, because the amount of detail is directly related to amount of data being streamed (all other things being equal).
Here in my native UK, the only real way you can reliably watch high-quality 4K football on a weekly basis is with Sky Sports' UHD offerings. When I had this, I often didn’t bother enabling motion smoothing because the clarity of the on-field images I was watching were exceptional anyway.
Now that I’m “slumming” it with a Now TV subscription on my Amazon Fire TV Stick, I’m sadly living off sub-1080p table scraps. When I watched Arsenal lift the Premier League trophy a few days ago at time of writing, I could barely make out Martin Ødegaard’s handsome Norwegian face as he hoisted the famous trophy above his dreamy head.
Poor image quality is obviously a much bigger issue during matches, and the times I experience distracting judder if I don’t enable motion smoothing on my OLED can be hugely distracting. Without frame interpolation, all of those skittish camera pans as the ball bounces from the halfway line to the edge of the D can sometimes make me feel queasy, particularly on a 720p stream.
While motion smoothing can definitely reduce annoying blur and make it easier to keep up with the ball during intense matches, if your TV lets you tinker with the level of smoothing being deployed, I’d highly recommend you play around with sliders.
On my LG OLED, user settings allow me to tweak TruMotion so that De-Judder and De-Blur parameters are both fixed at 5/10. This gives me a nice balance between onscreen fluidity without making heated on-field action look overly fake.
Motion smoothing is ideal for World Cup viewing, but…
Enabling motion smoothing for certain sports can make the action feel more immersive. Take it from someone who watched a ludicrous 61 Arsenal matches during the 25/26 season.
Once the World Cup kicks off on June 11, you better believe my LG’s TruMotion feature is getting whacked on as soon as Mexico takes to the pitch against South Africa.
But… you definitely shouldn’t enable motion smoothing when watching movies or your favorite shows. Inserting artificial frames into content that was filmed at 24 frames per second will only make big screen blockbusters look about as cinematic as a Real Housewives marathon (leading to the dreaded ‘soap opera effect’).
When 48 teams soon square off for the privilege of lifting the Jules Rimet Trophy though, you should feel no shame for embracing your TV’s frame interpolation techniques.
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